In the last five years, social media has exploded onto the scene as a viable way for media outlets to spread news much faster than they could previously, such as on their websites. With Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, the distribution of news has a brand new face. One result of the boom in social media's relation with news is that people in the 18-24 range are more involved with the reading and redistributing of news at a much faster pace than they used to be.
I talked with Kelly Rowe of the University of Maryland, who was part of a team researching the social media habits of college students. Rowe investigated the tendencies of college students using social media to interact with news online. Rowe wanted to use the results of her survey to try and create the profile of the average college student using social media as a way to access news. Although the results of her survey didn't show overwhelming numbers in terms of college students using social media as a primary news outlet, the development is still there.
Rowe's survey was sent out to University of Maryland students, who were asked a series of questions relating to their social networking habits and how they interacted with news stories online. 123 participants started the survey, and 121 finished it. Of those respondents, 31 said they used those networks to acquire "information." (For this survey, information was defined as news, events, and profiles.) 9 respondents said that they used the networks primarily to obtain news, and 5 said they used social media to share links and news.
A result from the survey that may have been misconstrued showed that, when asked whether they'd rather read a full news article or a tweet/Facebook post about that news, 88 would have picked the article while 27 would have picked the short-form information. However, social media offers much easier ways to access full articles. Twitter and Facebook links lead directly to articles, and major sites such as the Washington Post and Yahoo now have 'social reader' applications on Facebook. These social readers allow Facebook users to go directly to an article while remaining in the Facebook interface, and these applications have seen a lot of use in their early days.
There was a statistically significant relationship between respondents when it came to a comparison of what the respondents used social networks for and how often they posted news links to their social networks. This confirms the thought that the two activities are intertwined in at least some fashion. In terms of the social networks where respondents did acquire news, Facebook was the leading choice, with Twitter coming in a distant second and Google+ an even more distant third.
At the time of the interview, Rowe hadn't yet finished analyzing the data from both her own survey and the rest of the team's surveys, but was confident that she'd be able to create a profile. Rowe was pleased with the results of her survey. Although the results didn't show a monumental shift towards social media having a major use when it came to news aggregation and distribution, that movement is still trending upward.
